ABSTRACT
The conclusion chapter presents the closing thoughts of key concepts discussed in the previous chapters of the book. The marking and merging of horizons, characteristic, as we noted earlier, of the modern theatre, has appeared in a variety of ways in the plays subjected to detailed scrutiny. Episodic structure registers the punctuated equilibrium of lives devoted to controlling the boundaries that divide each social relationship from others that compete with it. Drama in the medieval period had its own characteristic use of an other-world format, one that depended on a particular conception of the relationship between space and time in both on-stage and off-stage worlds. The precipitates a line of argument about 'the theater's increasing alienation from society' which produces the startling, though tentative, conclusion that 'the theater has virtually ceased to serve as an aesthetic focus for contemporary experience'.
